miamidesignstudio.net

Since I began learning Ruby on Rails a few months ago, I’ve thought up tons of ideas for simple but useful webapps that could take advantage of the framework’s powerful features. Most of these ideas won’t ever be actualized simply because I don’t have the time, but there is one idea that we’re actually going to pursue. (“We” meaning myself and my friend Eric Lemmon)

Without going into too much detail quite yet, this webapp (we’re just calling it “Project Symphony” for now) will help classical musicians more easily procure and organize their sheet music. The goal is to create a large and easy-to-browse database of open source sheet music—both old and new works—that will facilitate the exchange of musical ideas and help make classical music a little bit more transparent and accessible. Musicians can add their own (presumably legal) copies of sheet music to the database and, conversely, add sheet music from the database into their own digital libraries and then manage them with a variety of organizational tools.

Simply put, musicians can remotely store and organize their sheet music collection as well as discover and share new compositions. Any musicians who have ever scrambled for missing pages or requested pieces the day of a gig will appreciate the usefulness of these features. It’s a pretty cool thing.

There’s no timetable since all the work is being done at our leisure (whenever there’s a free moment to spare), but we’ll be sure to keep you updated on our progress as we go along, including a followup in the next few weeks with some more details.

I’m collaborating on the project with Eric Lemmon, a talented violist and composer currently at NYU. You should check out his website at OpenSourceMusic.org, it’s an excellent read if you’re a classical music lover.

Anyways, that’s all for now. More later!